


Juke Joint Jezebel

by kittydesade



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-14
Updated: 2012-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-26 02:06:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/277424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Yellow-Eyed Demon zigs instead of zags, Jess lives, and kicks off a whole new set of consequences for Sam, Dean, and the cosmic plans for the Winchester family. Takes place through the first season of Supernatural only. Inspired by <a href="http://melannen.dreamwidth.org/8565.html#cutid1">this</a>, nudged and beta'd and co-planned by Anna, and powered by a healthy sense of the absurd.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Phish Food cured all ills. Jess stood by that, no matter how many times Sam argued that brain freeze could not be cured by more of what had caused it in the first place. Sam wasn't here to argue with her, though, so she was free to scrape the bottom of the pint and watch stupid movies on television. Gary Oldman and Bruce Willis shooting the snot out of each other, that was about the right level of stupid.

Sam would be back tomorrow, anyway. He had his interview, things were looking up. Maybe this was his big chance to reconcile with his big brother and who was she kidding, anyway. Dean had shown up and Sam had just taken off.

And Jess didn't know how to think about that. On the one hand, she'd learned more about Sam and his family in those couple of hours than she had in four years of knowing him, just by how he acted around Dean. On the other hand, she knew Dean's type. She knew what he was going to do, he was going to try to get Sam to run off with him and go find their father, and she could sympathize but it would completely ruin Sam's chances at doing something he really wanted to do and she didn't think Dean would appreciate that and now she was stabbing the ice cream with her spoon. Surely there had to be better ways to spend an evening.

So she flopped down long-ways on the couch and worked on chasing down every last damn chocolate fish in the tub.

It really was a stupid movie. But it was fun, and it was shiny and she got up and danced around to the Diva's song and she felt better.

And then she was hitting the spoon at the bottom of her ice cream tub and she was out of ice cream. That was not to be tolerated.

If she was going to go on a late night grocery run she might as well top off the fridge. Not that they were going to stay here much longer, but they were down to a bunch of things that didn't go together, and she at least wanted to be able to make sandwiches for the next few days. Sandwiches out of the leftover chicken, cheese for the frozen hamburger meat, hamburger buns.

Jess thought about the next few days, packing, moving, making decisions. Eating right was part of it, but they'd want comfort food too, snacks. And she wasn't going to get any sleep tonight, she'd figured that out about halfway through the movie. Cookies were clearly the best use of her time. She could make a batch, bake it, make another batch if she wasn't feeling tired, and so on until the sun came up if she had to. Wouldn't be the first time.

The night was cold, for California. She went downstairs, got about fifty feet, then ran back upstairs and grabbed a jacket for the trip of about ten blocks. It felt like someone or something had sucked all the heat out of the air, like she should be able to see her breath. "If this was a horror movie, there'd be a monster sneaking up on me right now," she muttered. And then she turned and went back into the apartment and got Sam's leatherman, just in case. Because there were monsters out there. They couldn't suck the warmth out of the air or set her on fire with a look, but they could be really nasty.

Okay. Now going to the store. At least there was a good solid line of street lights down to the store, not much in the way of shadow and they'd trimmed back the bushes away from the sidewalk. Still, she kind of wished Sam were here. If only for someone to talk to on the trip. Someone to keep her from buying those Swedish Fish or maybe talk her into it. She got some for him and some for her, and a pile of chocolate chips and tried not to worry. And by the time she got to the checkout she was blowing the rest of the month's bar money on cookies, but they were better for you than booze anyway.

Chocolate chip cookies came first. Then gingersnaps, then oatmeal raisin just for the look on Dean's face when he was expected to eat healthy food. If she could stay awake that long. She was already heading into plaintive and emotional territory, maybe she should just go to bed and call it a night. As she walked home the idea of bed started to have more appeal than the idea of cookies. Maybe just a double batch of chocolate chip.

She got as far as the first couple of rounds in the oven before she smelled it, and since the third batch was in at first she just looked through the window to make sure she wasn't burning anything. Only that didn't smell like burning cookies. That smelled like burning everything else. Plastic, fabric, and other things she wasn't sure she wanted to think about.

The apartment complex was on _fire._

 _Her_ apartment was on fire!

Something in the gas line to the stove must have ruptured. She didn't think, she didn't have time to think, she dove first into the bathroom since it was closest, then out the fire escape. The whole building went up quick, crazy quick, although it still seemed centered around their apartment like some sort of malicious force bent on destroying everything she and Sam had worked so hard for. She stared. Watched it burn. It was too complete a destruction for her to grasp it at first.

And then, absurdly, she heard it.

Arms as thick as tree trunks grabbed her from behind on the fire escape, of all things, and she didn't remember climbing back up there. The arms lifted her back and she kicked back at her assailant, realizing at the last minute that she could very well, kick them both off the edge.

Her assailant clearly knew it too. "Hey, hey, quit it, all right?" Dean. Dean??

"What the hell are you..."

"Run now, talk later," he said, and she did. Back down the fire escape, trying not to cry angry, empty tears at everything they'd just lost. Clothes, books, notes, transcripts, her computer, their TV. The small DVD collection they'd built. The stuffed bunnies he'd gotten her the last two Valentine's Days. Gone, all of it. The cookies she was making. Suddenly she really wanted chocolate chip cookies, and it seemed like the end of the world that they'd burned up along with all of her stuff.

And then Sam was there, and he smelled like Sam, not smoke. And that was a relief.

And then she remembered. "We have to go, we have to go back," she tried to explain, as she turned and ran back and this time both of them grabbed her and held her in place. "We have to go back, there's a kid in there..."

Sam and Dean exchanged a look. She knew what kinds of looks those were, she'd been to enough frat parties. She _hated_ those looks. "What are you..."

"Don't you hear it? There's a baby in there screaming her head off..."

There was _another_ look, right after the first one, too. "Sam, you'd better get..."

"I'm on it," he said, and then he gave her to Dean. Actually handed her off like a doll to his older brother. So Jess slugged him. Or tried to, since in the handing off process neither brother had let go of her arms. It didn't work. Dean was stronger than he looked, stronger than most of the guys she hung out with, she thought.

"What the hell are you two..." Something crashed inside the house. She screamed, mostly out of shock at the sound. And then she yelped again as cold metal dropped down over her breasts. "Goddammit, Sam..."

But the baby stopped screaming. She stopped. Listened. Then she did turn around and almost punched Sam in the face if he hadn't been quick enough to dodge. Really quick, too, a part of her noticed. "Jess..."

"You _bastard!_ You complete and total..."

"Jess, listen, all right? When was the last time you remember seeing anyone in that apartment with a baby?"

And now that he said it, she could think about that again. About the baby crying, which, now that she thought about it, sounded like a perfectly ordinary baby. Who needed to be changed or something, not a baby burning alive and out of its mind with pain. And for that matter, those flames were loud. So was the crashing of falling timbers, though she tried not to think about what else was crashing and exploding in there. How would she be able, logically, to hear a baby in all of that? Why had she ever thought it was real to begin with? Or heard it?

Panic, she decided. Sam and Dean both stared at her as though they were waiting for her to run back into the fire again. Which was about the stupidest thing she could do, really. She looked down to see what that cold metal thing was to distract herself from her previous stupidity. An amulet. Huh. An amulet that looked like Sam had been browsing the local Hot Topic, which didn't seem like him. She looked up again and they were still both staring at her.

"No, I'm fine," she told them, taking a couple steps back, raising her hands. "I'm fine. It's okay."

It wasn't okay. It was way, way too much to deal with, as late as it was and as tired as she'd been even before the fire started. Jess backed all the way up to the stoop and burst into tears.

* * *

They went over to Dean's car. It looked like he'd been living out of it for a few days, take-out packaging in the back seat, dirty laundry of the over-clothes kind at least, so she wasn't staring through the window at anyone's boxers. Sam's bag was on the other side of the seat from where she was looking. All the clothes he had left in the world, she thought. How depressing.

She didn't have the energy to be depressed right now, and Dean had some burns forming big ugly welts on his arms where he'd grabbed her out of the fire. The least she could do was patch him up.

"Do you guys have a..." First-aid kit. Sam and Dean were pulling it out and bitching at each other as though she wasn't even there. "Give me that, you can't patch yourself up," she grabbed the bandages from Dean.

Sam stepped back and let her, shooting Dean a look that Jess didn't catch and she was pretty sure she didn't want to. "Just let her, okay, she's right. Unless you've got a few more hands you can't patch yourself up, and I'm out of practice."

Out of practice?

At least the burns weren't too severe. She winced for him when he didn't react to the bandages and the ointment, remembering how he'd gotten them on her behalf. Because she'd been reacting to a baby who wasn't there. "Sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry for," he shrugged, went still again. "It happens."

No, it didn't just happen. She didn't just go out of her mind over a hallucination, and babies didn't start crying out of nowhere. Especially babies that didn't exist. And babies that didn't exist didn't cry, and now that she thought about it the apartment building had gone up awfully quickly. Either it was arson or it was something else, but it wasn't a gas explosion like Dean was trying to tell her it was while she was trying to make sure he wasn't burned anywhere else.

"...got loose while you were at the store, filled the room with gas, whole place probably ... ow."

"Big baby." Yes, she'd seen some of the scars. No, she wasn't asking. "There, doesn't look like you got hurt anywhere else. And, by the way? That's bullshit."

Both the boys gave her funny looks as she stepped back, scrubbed her hands and put everything she hadn't used back in the kit. "Jess, it was an old stove," Sam tried to tell her, "It probably got a crack, you didn't see it, and..."

"Sam, I was baking cookies for two hours in that room before the whole place went up. And it didn't explode, either. I didn't smell gas, and gas explodes, if it had been a gas line it wouldn't have gone up like the whole place was doused in, I don't know, rocket fuel. So don't go feeding me a line of crap about how our apartment burned down because of an old, faulty stove, all right?"

By the end of it she was almost yelling. And she still didn't understand how they could be so calm about this. Little by little, she got control of herself. After another minute or two of them staring at her she realized, no, Sam wasn't calm. He had that wide-eyed very still stare he got when things got messy, first between them, then when he was telling her about other problems. First there was the stare, then there was either running off to one of a handful of remote locations he thought she didn't know about, or there was blowing up. He was just as rattled as she was.

"Look, Sam..." Dean moved and her gaze flicked over to him, but he'd stepped back rather than into this. "Hey, look at me, okay?" Both hands on his shoulders, moving up to cupping his face in her hands, making him look at her. "I'm okay. You're okay, everyone's okay, everyone's safe." Not that she knew that, but the fire department didn't seem too worried, and there hadn't been any ambulances screaming down the street. If there had been anyone else in the building either they'd gotten out or they were beyond help.

Sam nodded, hands coming up and curling around her wrists. "Yeah, I know."

"So just tell me what happened, okay? The truth, this time." It had better be the truth. Or a more convincing lie, but she wasn't going to tell him that and give him ideas. It was bad enough that he'd tried it to begin with.

"The truth is..." Sam stopped in mid sentence, which didn't bode well. She narrowed her eyes and searched him for any signs that he was searching for a good lie rather than searching for words. "Okay, the truth is, we don't know what happened. But the fact that it wasn't the stove or an electrical fire or something... isn't all that surprising."

She gave it another beat. "And what do you _think_ happened?" Behind her she heard Dean draw breath and start to say something, and she pointed a finger back at him. "Not one word out of the peanut gallery."

Sam spread his hands. "I don't know. But it could be a lot of things. It could be, um... pyrokinesis. Or it could be ghosts. Demons..."

Jess didn't know what to say to any of that. "Your swamp gas story was better." Lame joke, but it was the best she could do without bursting into hysterical giggles. "Demons? Really? Evil spirits set fire to our..." she trailed off, her voice sticking in her throat amidst the sudden bout of sandpaper and fear. He wasn't kidding. Either he or this world was crazier than she had thought half a minute ago, and she truly didn't know which one to hope for.

"You're not kidding, are you. You really do believe that."

Dean spoke up before Sam could find the words this time. He sounded tired. "Look. It's way too long of an explanation to get into tonight, okay? Why don't we all just go back, get some rest, we'll talk about it in the morning."

"Go back where? " Their place was demolished. Burned to a cinder. To the foundation. She had nowhere to go.

  


* * *

  


'Back' turned out to be Dean's shithole motel room. Her first thought was angry and bitter, of course Sam's deadbeat brother would sleep in a motel room with dirty walls and filthy beds. Then she thought, no, that's uncharitable, it might just be what he can afford. Or at least, what he's willing to spare. And then her mind was too numb and Sam was nudging her in with a hand in the middle of her back and she didn't know what to think anymore. At least there were two beds.

Sam glared at Dean as the older brother flopped onto the bed and kicked his boots off, she didn't know what for. She did know she was going to bash her head against the stupid magic fingers quarter box thing to one side, and stuck a pillow between her and the would-be concussion-maker. At least she was still in her pajamas, she didn't have to worry about what she was going to sleep in. And she'd worry about what she wore tomorrow, tomorrow. Jess crawled under the blankets and turned her back to the boys, which was about as much sulking as she could manage. She wasn't going to let Dean see her cry. No way in hell.

"You think you could have been a little more abrupt?" Sam snapped, low-voiced, in case she really did want to go to sleep. She heard things moving around on the table, couldn't tell what they were doing.

Someone poured a glass of something, she heard that much. "She wanted the truth. You gave her the truth. You expected her to want to deal with it right then and there? You expected her to believe you?"

"'Her' can hear you, you know," Jess told the wall. The muttered 'sorrys' helped only a very little.

No one said anything after that. Either they were waiting for her to say something, ask about what had happened and the ghostbuster thing, or they were trying to figure out how to talk behind her back, or they were waiting for her to go to sleep. Sam came around to her side of the bed and crouched down in front of her; the sloshing sound had been water. Bottled water, since the sink hadn't run. He held it out to her with a small smile. "It's clean, at least?"

Jess glared at him half-heartedly for a second before she took it and sipped, smiling. "Thanks."

It wasn't all right. It was a very long way from all right, light years away. But the backs of his fingers brushed down her cheek and he gave her that sad puppy smile and she felt the tightness in her chest ease up a little.

They took turns sipping at the water and when she was done he sat by the bed and held her hand for a little while. She didn't look over to see what Dean's expression was, and Sam didn't seem like he wanted to think about it either.

"You know, Dad..." he started. Sam looked over her at his brother and glared, hard.

"Can we not do this right now?"

Another beat. "Yeah. Sure. Okay."

Jess shook her head, pressed her face into the pillow. "Go," she mumbled. "I'll be okay, I'll just ... go to sleep. I'll be fine." A lie, but one of those comforting lies. Anyway, she could manage. Fine might be a stretch, but she'd manage. "Go talk to your brother."

"You sure?" Sam's frown-pout-thing deepened. It made her smile.

"I'm sure. Go, figure out this stuff about your Dad. I'm not going anywhere."

He made a face. "Yeah, Dad's..." Hunting, she thought he was going to say. That was what Dean had said, that he'd gone off on a hunt and hadn't come back. But between that and the fire and the talk about ghosts and demons and things, she wondered what the truth was. "Okay, yeah. I'll be right over there if you need anything, okay?"

She nodded. He moved back around the bed, towards Dean, out of her field of vision. She closed her eyes because it was that or stare at the curtains and the walls and try not to see what might be roaches in the corner of the room. Or lint balls. They could be lint balls, they weren't moving all that much. Focusing on that kept her from listening in on the conversation behind her, though she still got bits and pieces.

"...could have found a solid lead, the first solid lead in..."

"Dean, maybe he's not finding a solid lead because there _are_ no solid leads. Maybe another hunter got it. Maybe it died of old age, we don't know. Are you going to spend the rest of your life tracking down the thing that killed Mom when we don't even know what it is or whether or not it's still around?"

Jess's eyes flew open again. Sam didn't talk about his family much, he talked about his Dad hardly ever, and he never talked about his Mom. Except to say, once, that she wasn't around anymore.

"Are you going to just let Dad ... run around out there, dealing with God knows what?" Dean sounded upset. She could understand why he would be upset about a missing father, but the rest of it she couldn't begin to guess. Dean was suspicious. Down to the point of being paranoid, and she couldn't tell if that was justified or not. There were pieces here that she was missing, important pieces.

Like the ability to believe in monsters and things under the bed.

She couldn't see Sam's expression and missed the next couple of sentences trying to think of how this was working, what Sam would do. What she would do if Sam did go off with Dean, not that she thought he would, but it was a possibility. Dean was persistent, desperate, he wanted his baby brother with him looking for his Dad. And that was the part she didn't like, because it made her feel for him. If her parents went missing and she had a sister or brother, she'd want to know where they were too. Maybe drag them along to go look for him.

Their voices lowered a little further and the bed creaked, one of them sitting down on it, she guessed. Arguing, by the tone of their voices, but not with enough heat to make them yell at each other. Whatever the thrust of the argument, she guessed it was about her and them and their Dad, they didn't resolve it before she fell asleep.

  


* * *

  


And they hadn't resolved anything by the time they got up. She started to make coffee since she was up first, then decided she didn't want to deal with the amount of cleaning it would take to get the coffee pot to where she would drink something brewed in it and bought coffee instead. Cheap as she could find it, a couple bucks from Sam's wallet when she realized hers had burned up in the fire.

Sam's good suit had burned up, too. Then again, the interview was presumably with at least one or two people he'd already taken classes with, right? Maybe he could get away without the suit.

"You've got that planning look on your face," Sam murmured, coming up beside her as she knelt by his bag and frowned at it. "What's up?"

"Just thinking what you're going to wear for your interview..."

His eyes widened. "Oh shit. I forgot about... Jess, I can't go to the interview like this. I mean, I've got jeans, I've got..."

"Torn up, dusty t-shirts?" She held one up for him to inspect. It looked like a house had exploded all over it.

He managed a sheepish grin from somewhere. "Um. Yeah. Hanging around with Dean can be a little hard on the clothes sometimes."

"I see that." Which also kind of explained why Dean looked like he'd either had those clothes for years or shopped out of thrift stores exclusively. She now bet on the latter. "Look, you've got clean clothes in your bag anyway, you'll go, the fire's all over the news right now, I don't think they'll blame you for all your nice clothes burning up in the fire."

"... Oh." Small, sheepish smile. "I hadn't thought of that."

Jess sat back on her heels and looked up at him. "Are you sure you want to go to this?" He didn't sound like himself. Or at least he didn't sound like the Sam she'd come to know over the last few years. "You and Dean talked last night. About your father?"

He nodded. "Dean thinks he's in trouble."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. Dad's... he was different," Sam said it with the kind of iceberg delicacy that suggested a whole world of back-story there, especially considering the conversation last night she was very strongly trying not to think about. "But he was always careful. He had... protocols for everything, he made plans. He was obsessed. Like crazy, and he did a lot of crazy things, but he was good at it. I don't know if I buy that he's in danger."

"You think your idea of danger and Dean's and your Dad's are all pretty different?" She reached out, ran her hand along his arm. "Do you think you can convince your brother that he'll be okay?"

"I don't know, but I doubt it. Dean's... he's always looked up to Dad. Always, he never wanted to see how bad off Dad could be. How bad it could get. And now that Dad's not here, he has to... to live up to that, somehow."

He had to be their father in their father's place. Jess wondered how long _that_ had been going on. "And going and saving him isn't just about saving him, it's about proving to him that..." She shook her head. "Okay, we'll deal with that when you get back."

"When I..."

Hands on his shoulders now, gripping tight. Making him focus on her and what she was saying. "The important thing right now is, do you want this? It's just an interview, it's not like it's set in stone or anything, but, do you want this?"

"I... yeah. I do, I mean, this is what I've been working for, right?" And he didn't sound as though he was asking to have her tell him what to do, or to have her tell him he was sure, more as though it was a rhetorical. "But I'd have to leave you and Dean..."

"Don't you worry about me and Dean, I can manage him for a few hours." Wry grin, there. She thought she could manage him at least. How bad could it be? "You just go to your interview, ace it, and come back and we'll figure out what the next step is, okay? One step at a time."

"Okay," Sam nodded, and she thought he looked a little better for having made that decision. She felt a little better for having pushed the question, at least for the moment it kept her from thinking about the rest of their problems. "I won't be gone long, yeah? Just a few hours."

"Just a few hours." She could handle a few hours.

By the time Dean was up Sam had just walked out the door, closing it quietly behind him. Jess was showered, dressed in one of Sam's old t-shirts and her shorts from last night and Sam had promised to stop by a store on the back and get her some jeans and some shirts at least. Dean looked around, frowned at the lack of Sam but the presence of Sam's bag. "Where'd he go?"

"To his interview," she told him, giving him a look that dared him to say something about that.

"Huh," was all he had to say, and he stumbled out to his car without another word or a look back.


	2. Chapter 2

And then Sam left him alone with his girlfriend.

He woke up and they were still talking, hushed voices and calm tones. Rather than interrupt he lay there and pretended to be asleep a while longer. Give them some time to themselves, as much as they could all have it crammed into a hotel room. After a while the door opened, closed, and then Jess went into the shower and it would just be awkward if he got up until she was fully dressed, so he waited till she'd gotten out and he heard her stop moving and rustling clothes. Did she even have spare clothes? He hadn't thought of that last night.

Dean sat up, and Sam was gone. His bag was still there, though, so he hadn't gone for good. "Where'd Sam go?"

"To his interview." With that kind of up-tone ending, half-hunched and tense expression like she expected him to argue with her about it. Braced for impact.

"Huh."

Dean would be the first to admit to himself, and the last to admit to anyone outside his own head, that he was glad she'd talked Sam into going to this interview. Sammy should do what he wanted, what he needed to do to be happy, that instinct had been crammed into his head from the moment he was four years old and hadn't abated with the four years Sam had been in college. That instinct also came at crashing odds with the feeling that Sam should be coming on the road with him helping to find their father, goddammit. Dean couldn't do this alone. Sure, he'd been hunting on his own for a while, but that was with the basic premise that Dad was okay.

Of course Dad was okay. Dad was Dad, right?

No, Dean had been an adult long enough to know that Dad being Dad wasn't enough to make him okay on his own. Hard to say when Dean had learned that lesson exactly, but he had.

He went out to the car to grab his gear bag for something to do while he waited for Sam to get back. Jess didn't seem to want to talk to him, she was making lists of something. All the reasons he sucked for coming back and harassing his brother. Maybe a grocery list, who knew. He didn't know what Sam had told her about him, but it didn't sound good. Maybe there wasn't much good to tell. Dean got the picture from the way she and Sam both acted that Sam hadn't told her much about the life, and what he had told wasn't complimentary.

On the other hand, he could admit that when you left out the part about how demons and ghosts and shit like that were real, it got pretty ugly pretty fast.

Car. Bag. Guns. He couldn't remember if he'd gone through them after that woman in white job anyway, and that meant it was past time. Dean slammed the keys down on the hood and rummaged through the trunk till all the guns were in the duffel, body shielding the sight from anyone glancing over.

When he got back in she didn't look up from what she was doing. So, fine, two could play at that game. He broke down all his guns, laid them all out over the bed and started cleaning each one with careful precision. Speed, too. Dad had taught him how to break down a gun and put it back together again as soon as his hands were co-ordinated enough for it. Over the years he'd gotten to where his hands knew the task better than he did, he could do it at speed half asleep. Dean didn't spend much time thinking about that.

It came in handy, anyway. Clean gun meant less likely to jam, less likely to screw him over when he needed it. And cleaning guns calmed him. Anything he could do with his hands where he saw a result at the end of it, a result he wanted, was a good thing.

"Will you..." she started, then stopped when he glanced up at her. Looked down at her lists and aimed the pen at the paper with a vengeance, but didn't write anything.

"Will I..." he waited. "What?"

Tap tap tap went the pen against the paper. She straightened her back but didn't turn like he expected. "If Sam comes back with a yes, will you let him go?"

Dean opened his mouth. Closed it, looked at the wall with its peeling paper and the crappy poster in a cheapass frame to make it look like this place didn't have coin operated beds and hot and cold running insect life. "It's not my decision," he said finally, back to wiping down the slide with a vengeance. "Never was."

"But you could stop him if you wanted." He didn't look over to see her expression. "If you asked, he'd go with you."

She didn't say anything for the longest time, long enough to make Dean nervous. He figured that he'd learned how to take the measure of people, but he didn't have a handle on Sam and this girl. Sam had been gone for four years, and the fact that Dean had never known a girl for longer than a couple of weeks was something he didn't think about too hard. How long they'd been together, what plans they'd had before something burned down their apartment the way the demon had burned down their home, years ago.

Dean kept coming back to that, the apartment building burning down the way the house had burned down, everything up in flames in an instant.

"I don't want to stop him," she said, returning to her lists but not writing much of anything. "I don't want to stop him from doing anything he wants to do. I just want to be sure he's making the right choice for the right reasons. Whatever choice that is."

She lifted her head and locked eyes with him hard enough that he thought she would have given his Dad a run for his money. Okay, maybe not, but she damn well would have tried. Like he was trying not to laugh at the thought. "Who says what the right reasons are?" he asked, dropping his stare after a second because he wasn't too proud to blink first in a staredown with his brother's girlfriend. Also because he had a half-assembled gun in his lap.

She didn't answer, and he finished assembling the gun and checking the action before making sure the safety was on and stowing it back in his bag.

“To make him happy.” Jess's voice startled him enough that he almost dropped the shotgun. “That's the right reason. Doing what he wants to do because he wants to do it. Not...”

He turned around to look at her, well, turned halfway. The shotgun still sat on his lap, and he kept one hand on the base of the barrels to keep control of it.

“Not because he wants to please you, or your father, or even because he thinks it's the right thing to do... although that would be nice. I mean, because he wants to. Because he wants to do the right thing, or because he just wants to do the right thing by him, that's a good reason.”

Dean went back to cleaning the shotgun because if he thought about that too hard his head would hurt. “What about if what makes him happy is something... I don't know. Hurting people.”

Jess didn't sound pleased. “He's not like that.”

Yeah, maybe. Sammy never was that kind of kid, but he wondered about her thinking. If she stuck to that make Sam happy line of thinking, though, he had to wonder about her. And whether or not he wanted to spend any more time with her than he had to.

She went back to her lists, or whatever she was doing. He finished cleaning his guns, dumped most of them back in the car, then went over the rest of his gear. They didn't talk again until Sam got back, for lack of anything to say to each other. Dean couldn't get rid of the nagging impression that his baby brother had turned into something else while he wasn't looking, something he knew nothing about. A normal person, a real person, the way the rest of the world thought people should be. Jess was a part of that real live boy gig. He didn't know how he felt about that.

* * *

Sammy came back, and Dean went out and cleaned out the car to give them some space. Again. The whole delicate balance of privacy and making sure Sam didn't do anything stupid, keeping an eye on his stuff and them and his impatience to get on the road and get back to tracking down their father, it grated on his every nerve. It had been fine for a while, but he wanted to get out of town now that the job was done and they had nowhere to go if he did. Right now he had precious little patience left. Had enough, though, he told himself, that he could give them a little time to themselves to talk over how it had gone. He got some of that outside, anyway.

“I guess it went well.” Sam approached with his hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders hunched up around his ears. “I don't know, I'm supposed to hear back pretty soon, they said they'd give me a call, since I don't have steady internet access right now...”

“You can use my computer, it's hooked up to the motel's, if you wanna check your email.”

Sam's eyebrows shot up. God, Dean hadn't missed that look. “Dean, you run a four year old laptop that's covered in viruses.” Something about that punch to the gut must have shown up in his face when he reared back out of surprise. “Yeah, okay, sure. Um, just, you know. Write down the login and password? Thanks.”

“No problem,” he muttered, stomped over back to clearing out the back seat and that was the end of the brotherly interaction for the moment.

By the time he got everything cleaned out of the car and made a concession to people's sensibilities by wiping down the seat with disinfectant wipes they had better have finished up their cuddly moment.

Sam sat on the edge of the bed looking at the space between him and the phone in his hand. Jess sat next to him, one hand kneading on his shoulder, the other arm curled tight against her. The silence hung so thick in the air he thought he would choke on it. Dean raised his eyebrows at them, moving past to his bed and settling down on it with his notebook of casefiles, his diary, whatever. “That doesn't look good.”

“Ah, no, no, it's good.” Sam didn't look up, but at least he was talking. “I got in. At least, I'm pretty sure I got in, I got a text from someone I know in admissions, says it looks good, there's no reason I shouldn't...” He trailed off. Dean watched his back hunch over further.

“Well, it sounds like you got a choice to make.” The second the words left his mouth he knew it was an asshole thing to say, even without Jess glaring at him over Sam's shoulder. But he didn't know what else to do. He didn't like the idea of Sam leaving to go back to school when things were this bad, and he wasn't going to pretend he didn't. He'd never been good at hiding his feelings where Sam was concerned.

But he'd never, ever tried to make Sammy do something he didn't want to do. Okay, yeah, eat his dinner, go to bed on time, do his homework, things like that, yeah, he'd make Sammy do those things. But he'd never try to force him to stay when he wanted to go. He would never try to make Sam come back to the life if he didn't want to.

Didn't mean Sam leaving, again, and Dean on his own with Dad who knew where didn't scare the crap outta him. He'd never, ever admit that out loud either. Not to anyone.

“It's only for a couple of years,” Jess told Sam, while Dean winced. A couple of years could be all you had left in their line of work. You never knew how long you had till someone punched your ticket. “Then you can figure out where you want to go from there. They'll give you a really good scholarship...”

Sam made some kind of noise, Dean knew it and by the way she dropped back out of the conversation, if it had been a conversation, so did Jess. “You don't know that,” Sam told her after a second or two. “And we can't afford law school, not with the fire, not with everything...”

“There's loan programs.” But her voice and enthusiasm cooled considerably.

Dean made a thoughtful scowl, not that either of them could see it. A loan program might actually be perfect for him, the way they were, you didn't have a fixed address and half the time they went around under assumed names with forged credit cards anyway. It wasn't like some collections agency could catch up with them. He didn't say it in front of Jess, but if Sam wanted to go he could bring it up later.

More silence. The light filtered through the windows, tinted by the generic beige curtains and yellowing as the day went on. Dean distracted himself with the notebook, with pulling things together and going over reports from Bobby Singer, Pastor Jim, Uncle Daniel. Kind of uncle Daniel. Sam and Jess bent over the table, going over figures and what it would cost to rent an apartment and go to graduate school, if they could scrape it together.

“You know, if we catch up with Dad...” Both of them turned and stared. “If I catch up with Dad,” he amended. “We could probably, um, throw in. Sell off a couple of the guns, some artifacts. They're pretty ...” Jess had no idea what he was talking about. Dean clamped his mouth shut again.

And Sam shook his head. “I couldn't do that to you guys, man, no.” He turned back to the paper they were sketching figures out on, Dean caught something about no fixed address, homeless, and something about a scholarship or stipend or an s-word like that. Okay, throwing himself on the pity of the system sometimes worked, yeah, they'd gotten more than a few hot meals out of social workers when Dad had been on a hunt and forgot that growing boys needed three squares a day and more. The idea that Sam would call him and their father homeless, though, and knowing what would go through the minds of the administrators who processed that paperwork, that grated. They weren't poor. They weren't homeless or dirty, they had enough money to afford hotel rooms and hot food. Other people's money, granted, but still.

He kept his mouth shut. Money was money, it might hurt his ego but the more money Sam could squeeze out of the government to pay for law school, the better. Dean clenched a fist around the pencil, opened his hand before he snapped it in half. Jess was right, Sam should do what made him happy. Regardless of whether or not it made Dean happy.

“Put in the applications for scholarship and financial aid, look, we can do it tonight.” Jess pulled Sam's laptop out of the bag, opened it up and powered it on as he passed her the slip of paper with the login information. “Put them in, I've got savings, between the two of us we should be able to cover a couple month's rent on a new place while you look for a job and get the information back on ...”

“You're managing me again.” Sam smiled. He didn't smile, and he wasn't that nice to Dean. Usually his comments to Dean were more along the lines of back off, it's my life.

Jess smiled back, steady and bright. It punched Dean deep down in the gut where he didn't look too close at what this reminded him of. “Well, you could use it sometimes. Just trying to be practical.”

Sam kissed her forehead, and their voices lowered and Dean dropped his head and stopped eavesdropping. She focused on the practical things because it was what she could fix, Dean did the same thing. And Sam got to thinking and didn't stop, he remembered that from when Sam still lived with them. Sam had always been a quiet, thinking kid. Asking questions Dean couldn't answer.

“Christ, listen to me, it's like ...” Dean scrubbed a hand over his head, hard. They looked over their shoulders at him again. “Nothing. Never mind.”

“Dean...”

“Come on,” he swung his legs over the side of the bed, notebooks and pencils slamming down on the bedside desk table thing. “We're going out. My treat.”

Sam blinked. Jess started to smile, stopped at the look on Sam's face as he blinked between her and Dean. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Come on, it's a, a thing to celebrate, right? Happy occasion. Let's go out and celebrate it.”

It didn't bring out the smiles he hoped for. Sam looked at him like he'd started throwing cartwheels, Jess had a wary expression on. Willing to go along with it, but not sure what to think about him. Dean shrugged his jacket on and led the way out the door. If they didn't follow him, hell, he'd just get dinner by himself, fuckit. They didn't have to celebrate if they didn't want to. He didn't know why he was trying anymore.

* * *

They came with. Dean took them out to a decent chain steakhouse, which was about all the celebrating he could manage with not knowing the area and being about on the tail end of this credit card, but they relaxed a little when they got there. A little more when the appetizers came out.

“Unless something's changed since I saw him last, Sammy eats like a horse.”

“Don't call me Sammy,” the horse said, grabbing the last two potato skins. Jess giggled behind a sip of her iced tea. “And I do not eat like a...”

“You do,” she pointed out. “You really do.” Dean grinned at her, a little surprised when she grinned back.

So, maybe this dinner wouldn't be a disaster after all.

Steaks arrived. Everyone tore into theirs for a few minutes, and eating trumped all conversation. Jess slowed first, spending more time cutting up her steak and frowning at her plate than shoveling food into her mouth. Dean looked at Sam, Sam looked at Jess and then back at Dean with a shrug. Hell, if something was wrong, he didn't think she'd tell him. He didn't know if Sam would volunteer.

When she did blurt it out it came when both of them were eating, and Sam choked on his green beans. “I think I should go with Dean.”

Dean's fork and knife clattered to the plate, and his hands shot up almost before Sam could glare. “Hey, don't look at me, this came out of nowhere for me, too. And I'd like to know what's going on, too, what makes you think I'd want you to come with me?”

Jess ticked them off on her fingers without missing a beat. “One, because I finally did get my EMT certification, basic level, but still, six weeks ago. And just going by what I've been overhearing, you guys could use someone with medical skills on your side.”

“Hey, we got a lot of experience pat--” Dean bristled.

“Skills, not experience. I've got training, you've got hours in dirty hotel rooms washing out cuts with booze and stitching yourself up with a leather needle you probably sterilized with your lighter. Second, you're an idiot. And you need someone to watch your back.”

Sam chortled again, a half-choked sound accompanied by eyes so wide he could see white around the hazel. “She's got a point, Dean.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I can't afford med school right now, and the only other thing I'd be able to do is get a job to help support the both of us, which would be my second option,” she looked over at Sam, one hand resting on his arm. “Believe me, this isn't something I came to on a whim. But you,” she nodded at Dean. “Need someone to watch your back, if this whole buildings erupting into flames thing is typical of what you're going through. And right now you don't have your Dad, and you don't have Sam. If Sam decides to go to law school.”

“I hadn't... actually made up my mind yet. And, hey, what about scholarships, right? What about financial aid...”

Jess shook her head. “I won't qualify the way you will, I have family that would theoretically help support me, I have history... and it's a lot harder to go into medical school and come out with a job able to support those loans than it is with law school, you have options with law school. Believe me, I've looked into it. And it'd be easier if just one of us goes to one ridiculously expensive graduate school at a time,” she smiled slightly. “When you're a big shot lawyer, you can put me through med school.”

Dean blinked. She at least had given it some thought, but that didn't mean it was a good idea. “You have no idea what you're getting into here, Jess,” he told her. Both her and Sam's eyes fixed on him, now, and he pushed his plate away as his appetite sank down around the level of his boots. “This isn't the kind of life anyone chooses. This life chose us. We grew up this way, we know what the risks are, you don't...”

“Then explain it to me,” she pressed, leaning forward and poking the air between them with her fork. “Explain it to me in graphic detail, and then explain to me why I would want to let Sam go anywhere near that, again.”

Both brothers shut up.

“Uh-huh. Look, I just ...”

“Wait, so it's all right for you to protect me from this, but I just have to stand back and let you ...”

“Yes,” Jess snapped. Dean made an attempt at sinking back into the booth. “Because, goddammit, this is the shit you don't ever talk about. This is the stuff that wakes you up in the middle of the night, that makes you jump every time some breeze bangs the window open. And this is the part of you that I never, ever get to see. So, yes, it's my turn to go chasing after monsters now, because one of them tried to kill me and I am _pissed. Off._ ”

This wasn't the conversation to be having in a crowded steakhouse. At least two families around them had dialed down the conversation to a distracted murmur. In the silence that followed Jess's last tirade, all of them noticed the eavesdropping. Dean cleared his throat, took another sip of soda to try and regain some energy to finish off what was really a pretty damn good steak. “Uh. To be conti--”

“No. Not, to be continued. I'm going with you. Either with you and Sam, or with you and Sam goes to law school.”

“Dammit, Jess,” Sam rubbed his forehead and sighed at the same time as Dean's silverware clattered to the table again.

“Look, you have no clue what you're getting into, all right? You think that apartment fire was weird? That's just the beginning of the weird we get into. I'm not talking freaky coincidences and twins talking in unison, I'm talking full on ghosts that will kill you just as soon as scare you, I'm talking monsters, I'm...”

Jess kept her eyes locked on him, didn't look at Sam. “Freaky shit. I get it. Does the freaky shit have rules?”

“I... what? Rules?”

“Yeah, rules. Don't feed them after midnight, don't get them wet, stake through the heart. You know, rules.”

“I...” Dean threw his forehead onto the table and locked his hands behind his head, muttering. “Yeah, I guess. Sure, it has rules.”

“Then, I'm cool with it. I'll just have to learn the rules as I go along.”

He kept his forehead on the cool, lacquered to within an inch of its life table because it was easier than looking up and seeing his brother's face right at that moment. Dean knew how he would have felt if, well. There had been someone. And he knew how he would have felt if she'd decided she wanted to pack up and join him, even though what had happened hadn't been a barrel of laughs, either. Now he was sorry for bringing this all down on Sam, worry about Dad, arguing with Jess, all of it. Not something he could talk about in front of her and the whole damn restaurant, though.

When he sat up again everyone was doing the uncomfortable family dinner thing, trying to choke down their food through a silence full of bad feeling and words you wanted to take back but couldn't. If no one else was going to talk about it, he damn well wasn't going to bring it up. Plenty of time to scream at each other back at the hotel.


	3. Chapter 3

Somehow, Sam decided, he had landed in Bizarro World.

He couldn't imagine Jess hunting. His brain refused to admit the possibility, visual or otherwise. Up at the forefront all the logical arguments against it took their places in preparation for the discussion, while in the back of his mind the over-protective stereotype screamed and waved his arms around. No way in hell was his girlfriend getting involved in something this dangerous. Not ever.

Not even if she wanted to. She didn't know what she was getting into, he rationalized, even though heading down the path of _I know better than you so do as I say_ made him all kinds of uncomfortable.

Dean started to say something when they got back to the motel room, but after the first couple of syllables and they both turned to him he glanced from one to the other, shook his head, and muttered something about checking on the car as he walked out. Sam winced when the door thudded shut behind him. Being the odd one out was never easy, he knew that from growing up as he had, and now Dean was the odd one out and he had no idea how his brother was taking it.

They turned and spoke at the same time.

“I want to do this, Sam.”

“You have no idea what you're getting into.”

They stopped. Sam took a breath, and she went on. “I want to do this. I know I don't have any idea what I'm getting into, when I went to college I didn't have any idea what I was getting into...”

“Goddammit, Jess, this isn't like that. This isn't some place where if you screw up, you have to go home, these things could kill you...”

“And getting blasted at a frat party and driving home couldn't...” she shook her head. “No, never mind, don't answer that. I have a pretty good idea what you're talking about, maybe more than you think. Remember those trashy fantasy novels with the elves driving racecars?”

Sam gaped at her. “Are you seriously...”

“No, better question. You remember that one comic, where the two immortal beings went looking for their brother and a lot of people died as a result?”

He did, now that she brought it up, though he didn't know why. Mostly he remembered the short chick with the multi-colored hair who talked in funny word balloons. “Jess, what does that have to do with you going off with my brother...?”

“I might not know the rules, or how to kill a vampire or how to tell if someone's a werewolf or anything? But I have a pretty good idea of what goes on when you find out the world isn't what you thought it was on the surface. I'm in good shape, I don't have any medical conditions, and the rest...”

She closed her mouth before she said anything involving the qualifier 'just', which he figured she'd been about to say. “The rest, what, you'll learn as you go along? From Dean?” He stopped short of saying Dean wouldn't teach her, because if it was a question of teach her or let her stumble along on her own he knew the older Winchester would help out. “What happens if you run into something dangerous? You could get into real trouble...”

“And what did you do, the first time you went out hunting like this?” she retorted.

Hard to have a yelling argument without raising his voice so Dean would hear, but he gave it his best shot. “I was six months old, Jess, I didn't have a choice.”

She didn't step away. She didn't yell back, either, and after he'd counted seventeen seconds ticking by on the old analog clock on the nightstand he wondered if he'd said something too shocking. Or unforgivable, though he couldn't think how it would be.

“Sam...” she reached and curled her fingers around his, stepping into him. “I know it's scary, okay? I know it's something I'm not prepared for. But I will bet you that everyone who wasn't born into this life started out the same way. Getting in over their head because of something that tried to kill them, something that killed someone they care about, and they ...” she stopped, then, probably because all he could think of now was his Dad and the stupid quest for the yellow-eyed demon.

“That doesn't make it right,” was all he said. All he could manage to say. Too many years of being left alone in hotel rooms with Dean, too many times wondering if Dad wasn't coming back this time, if he'd gone away for good, and those were just the two things it was easiest to express. The rest of it clogged his throat till he couldn't speak. Sam shook his head.

“It doesn't make me any more or any less likely to get killed, either. Something tried to kill me already, Sam. I'm not going to stand back and wait for it to try again.”

Sam felt his mouth draw into a tight little line, because she was right about that part. Whatever had tried to kill her, if it wasn't tied to that location (and he didn't think it was when they'd been living there for a while with no problems), it had probably tried to kill her because of him. Or because of Dean, because their lives were tied up in ten kinds of shit and she didn't deserve this. “So going along with Dean is your answer? Going with Dean, dealing with god knows what, and I get to go to law school?”

Her fingers laced through his, squeezed. “If you're in school, I know you're safe. Or at least,” she amended, “I know where you are. And I know you can handle yourself with this stuff, I mean, you grew up with it. I'm with Dean, which means I'm safe, and I get to learn how to beat this. Because no demon, no wizard or sorcerer, no... fire breathing monster gets to try and kill me. Screw this damsel shit.”

Sam laughed. It didn't feel like a laugh, and it was short, and it felt broken and scared and cold on the inside, but that was Jess. Stubborn and fierce. “It won't be easy, you know. I mean, I know you think you know what it's like, but it's not... It's sleeping in motel rooms, doing a lot of pretty, uh, questionable things for money, eating a lot of fast food, and doing a lot of running for your life.”

“Well, I didn't think you guys had some kind of rich old uncle financing you and your van and your oversized dog,” she quipped. Part of him wished she'd stop and take this seriously. “I have a pretty good idea what I'm getting into, I've been thinking a lot about this while you were at your interview.”

“And you decided you want to be Wonder Woman?”

Her crooked smile matched his. “Can you think of anyone better? That, and I decided that if I'm going to spend conceivably the rest of my life with someone, yes, Brady told me.” Because Sam's mind snapped back from thoughts of Jess being cornered by ghosts and werewolves to that one terrifying afternoon at the jeweler's. “Then I think I'd better get to know the guy. The real guy,” she poked him in the chest with a fingertip. “Not that I think the Sam Winchester I went to school with is fake, so much as... it's not the whole Sam Winchester. I think I'd like to get to know all of him. I get the feeling he's a pretty cool guy to know.”

Sam couldn't see the face he made but it had to be hilarious. Dean stood in the doorway looking back and forth between the two of them. “I am so glad I missed whatever it was I missed.” Which was a jolt of cold water to the senses, right there. “You two done?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Yeah, I guess we're done.”

Not that kind of done, he meant, pulling Jess into a hug before that moment of panic could get any more blatant. Pulled her into a hug, sighed, didn't know what to say. What the hell was there to say? “You better stay safe, you hear me?” he mumbled into her hair. “You better not get yourself...”

“I know, I know, I get myself killed and you'll kill me,” she smiled a little. “I'll be careful. I promise.”

* * *

The next day was better. Even after Dean had gone to sleep and Sam counted about a hundred and twelve sheep, and Jess woke up again and they sat up talking quietly under the covers, it was better the next morning. Even with the lack of sleep.

They went out for waffles for breakfast. Jess did her thing when the waitress came around of pointing and saying “He'll have page two” and Dean barked a startled laugh. Sam grinned, absurdly proud.

“I like her,” Dean pointed his fork at Jess. “There's just one thing I don't get.”

“One thing?” Jess murmured.

“How the hell did you end up with a lump like him?”

Jess clapped a hand and a napkin over her mouth as she tried and failed not to laugh through her orange juice. Sam could have looked indignant but the truth was that it was a huge relief to have Dean and Jess laughing and joking together, especially if she was set on this whole hunting business. Dean hadn't said anything one way or the other the night before, except a gruff 'we'll see'. If Jess had a doubt or two whether or not he'd take her with him, she hadn't voiced it.

“I'm luckier than you are,” Sam told him, when Jess didn't seem likely to recover her powers of speech anytime soon.

Dean shook his head. “No question.” And still didn't bring up the subject of hunting. Not till they were done with their breakfast (Sam paid) and had split the bags and everything was piled in separate heaps on the floor of the hotel room. For once, Dean had the most stuff, because he had the weapons. It still looked meager and sad compared to the home they'd made over the last couple of years.

Dean looked down at the bags, then over at Jess. “You know how to shoot a gun?”

“Point the gun, pull the trigger?” she started, then shook her head. “Other than that, no.”

Sam turned back to putting away his laptop so he didn't have to deal with Dean giving him the look. “We'll get you out shooting, at least.”

“We?” Sam looked over at him.

Funny how, four years ago, he hadn't thought Dean was this obvious. Sam watched his brows furrow a bit, his jaw clench, all the little ways Dean pulled in on himself when shit went down and he had to muscle forward and do the job. He hadn't meant for this to be a job for Dean.

No sign of it in his voice, though. “Me and her. You're still going on to law school?”

“Yeah, if I can manage it. If my buddy's right about this...” About him getting in, if he could find a place and afford the books, a lot of ifs. But the point was, yes, he was staying to pursue that angle. Dean would have to take Jess on and teach her the ropes alone.

Jess looked back and forth between the two of them, didn't say what she was thinking. What he guessed they all were thinking. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. How were they all going to manage this?

“You'll make it.” She came up, put her hands on his shoulders and gave him that look she got when he had one of those raised by wolves moments. “You're stubborn, you're smart, and you'll make it. I expect to hear a lot of stories about your fantastic successes when we check back in, okay?”

Not so much okay, it wasn't that simple, but it helped. The good-byes were quick after that, the hugs a little less so, and there was some manly backslapping because hugging Dean in front of Jess was just weird. Hugging Dean at all was just weird. And then they hauled her bag into the trunk and Dean promised not to get her into too much trouble and Sam had the weirdest feeling for a second. Like he'd just missed something. But it passed. They got into the old Impala and drove off.

He could still make out the familiar shape of the back end when the fear hit. Too far away to chase after them, too close to be able to push it out of his mind. That nagging feeling that he'd just said good-bye for the last time and, goddammit, that was such a cliché. Moping while someone drove off into the distance. Sam turned and stormed back into the motel to grab his bags before he went to the bus station to wait for his ride.

The motel wasn't much better. Empty, cleaned out of all their stuff, they'd been there only a couple of nights and it still felt like there was this giant, Jess-shaped hole in his life that would never be filled. And he could hear her response to that now, equal parts complaining about him describing her as giant and reminding him of the practical, logical things. She'd call every night, every other night at least. Dean wouldn't take her on any really dangerous jobs to start with, she'd learn quick. She was strong, capable, she'd had a point about that.

But the converse didn't have to be true, either. How was he going to make it? Going to law school with no job, no home, most of his stuff burned up in the fire, he had nothing except the clothes on his back and a bag and a half worth of clothes and things. Now he heard Dean's voice in his head, short sentences, terse words with an uplift at the end. Done more with less. You're a bright kid, Sammy. No, he could do this. Take it one step at a time.

Sam lifted his head and ducked into the bus shelter to take those first couple of steps. Winchester family tradition, make it up as you go along. Why stop now.

* * *

Like the movies, the first minute or five of the ride out was more dramatic than the first few hours. After she stopped needing to turn around to check if Sam was still visible out the back window she picked at the fabric of her jeans or stared out the window in silence. Dean didn't even turn on the radio, assuming it worked. Just the open road, the hiss of tires on pavement and the roaring rush of other cars passing by, car horns when someone forgot to signal before they merged. The occasional bump as they ran over some cardboard box or something in the road.

Jess wasn't comfortable with the silence. The longer it went on, the more time she had to question her decision. Was it the right choice? Was there even a way to make a right choice right after being burned out of her home? She could have gone back to her parents, maybe, dropping out was one thing but having your apartment and all of your stuff burned down was an understandable setback to one's education.

Of course, that assumed that whatever had come after her didn't follow her home. Put her family in danger. That was the part she had to remember, the part that stuck in her head whenever she wondered what the hell she was doing taking an extended road trip with a guy she'd known for a couple of days. First of all, the guy was the brother of her boyfriend of a couple of years, and secondly Sam trusted him. For the most part. Maybe didn't trust him not to be a jackass, although she'd gotten more used to Dean's rough attitude towards everything, but trusted him anyway. With the important stuff. And he knew what was going on, had a better idea of what happened with the fire than she did, and the baby hallucinations and everything else.

In the stories there was always that moment where the heroine set out, Bilbo looked back and missed his home and his pipe, the detective meets the vampire and wonders why things can't be normal, there were moments like this. She shifted her weight and then didn't put her foot up on the dash, Dean might not like that, but she did sit up a little and look out the window. This was normal. First there was the call to adventure, then you had to cross the first threshold.

Jess clamped down on the giggle as she thought back to that literature class; Dean heard it anyway. “What?”

“Nothing.” She ducked her head, grinning. “I guess that makes you my supernatural mentor.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Nothing.”

More silence, until they stopped for gas. The daylight seemed brighter when she stepped out of the car and stretched, even though they were under the awning. Jess walked a slow circle most of the way around the car and back again; her muscles weren't used to this at all. Sitting still in the car for hours at a time. Sitting still in classes, sure, but every hour or so that was punctuated by getting up and running to the next one. She felt like she'd been folded up and stuffed into a box for a whole day.

“What's the game plan?” she looked over the hood of the car at him. Watched him go from wanting to remind her that this wasn't a game to deciding she didn't mean that literally, he wasn't all that good at hiding his thoughts. At least, that was the impression she had so far. How well did she know him, anyway? “What are we doing?”

He turned away, scrubbed a hand over his mouth and chin. “Picked up a lead from Dad's notebook, the last case he worked. So we'll head there, start there. See what we're dealing with.”

Jess nodded. He didn't add anything to that, not till the gas money climbed and the lever clacked down. “How far away is it?”

“'nother several hours.” He nodded over at the gas station, convenience store. “Might as well get something to eat, we'll be driving for a while before we stop for the night.”

Road food. She didn't like the idea of road food, there wasn't much healthy in it, too much salt, too much sugar, always left her feeling kind of unwell. But it was better than nothing. She found some jerky, couple bottles of water and one of tea for pretty cheap, crackers and cheese and dried fruit slices. Dean gave her the raised eyebrows when she got back but didn't say anything. He didn't pull away from the pump, either, lifting the hood and checking the oil levels at least while he was there. She tossed the bag onto the seat and leaned against the side of the car.

“Always do your own maintenance,” Dean told her, head still tucked under the hood. “You maintain your own equipment, don't let anyone else do it for you. That way you know what's been done, you got a good idea how well your stuff goes, and you can fix any problem you run into if you're out somewhere with no mechanics or anything.”

Jess nodded, shifting from foot to foot a couple times before she came up with anything to say. “What about the shooting?”

“We'll get to the guns later.” He looked over at her with a half a grin that looked to her like he was laughing at her, and her cheeks flamed up hot. “You pack light. One bag for clothes and shit like that, one bag for gear. Think you can keep it down to that?”

“I don't have a world record collection of shoes or anything if that's what you mean,” she retorted. “I can keep it down.” She already had a list planned in her head. Ten or so t-shirts, couple pairs of jeans, six or seven sets of underwear. Socks. Shoes. That'd fit in a duffel bag. Maybe find some kind of nice dress for formal occasions that folded up tight and didn't need ironing, a pants suit the same for if she needed to get somewhere upscale. Dean, she had already decided, wouldn't do upscale.

His mouth twitched at her reply. Still laughing at her. “Good. And we're not doing double rooms, you'll just have to live with it. Some nights, might not even have a double bed.”

“You warn Sam we'd be sleeping together?” was the first thing that came out of her mouth, and now her cheeks flushed for a whole other reason. She couldn't even imagine sleeping with Dean, although saving the money for a single bed or a single room made practical sense. She'd manage when it came down to it, she just didn't think of putting those words in that order in a sentence together.

“He knows what this life is like.” Dean didn't smile. She realized he was thinking of Sam, of their time together, and then she wasn't smiling either.

She got in the car, transferring the bag from the seat to her lap. He finished up whatever he was doing, closed the hood and wiped his hands before climbing into the car himself. They still didn't leave.

“You stick close to me,” he said finally, after a long silence. “You do what I tell you, when I tell you. If I tell you to run, you run. I tell you to hide, you hide. If I tell you to shoot something, you shoot it. Even if it looks human.”

The fact that he added that made her want to ask all sorts of things. If he'd ever killed a human by mistake. If he'd ever been wrong about someone. How many people or things had he killed. Shot. He said shoot, not kill, but that was a really thin line to divide something by. You shot someone even non-fatally, if they were in a remote place with no medical attention, chances were good they'd die anyway. And she had meant to go into a profession to save lives. Could she shoot someone in cold blood because someone she'd known for two days said so?

Jess nodded, because if she didn't she was pretty sure he'd turn right back around and drop her off with Sam. And she didn't know if he had that kind of time, and she didn't know if she wanted him to do that. “I'll try.”

“You better do more than try,” he told her. “If you don't shoot these things first, they'll kill you. If you're lucky.”

She didn't ask what that meant. “Yeah, I can do that.” What he'd said before. No, she didn't know if she could, but she'd try.

He didn't look like he was convinced she could either, but he nodded, started the car up and rolled out of the gas station lot. She reached forward and grabbed the box of tapes out from the passenger floorboards to distract herself, rummaging through them. Not bad, either. At least he had decent taste in music, and she wasn't about to listen to another three or four hours of silence.

“Hey, hey, hey,” they pulled out onto the access road. “What do you think you're doing?”

“Looking for something to listen to,” she snapped back, eyebrows lifted. Then pressing her lips together to hide the grin. Dean, territorial over his tape player, radio, whatever worked in this car that was older than either or both of them. Along with most of his music.

“Nuh-uh.” He grabbed a tape from her at random, opened it up and popped it in. “My tapes.”

“Your tapes?”

“My car, my tapes.” Bon Jovi started up, and he turned the music up to just shy of blasting levels just, she thought, to prove the point. “My music. House rules.”

“House rules.” Jess put her foot up on the dash to give him something else to glare at her about, looking away so she didn't laugh. To his face.

“Uh-huh. House rules, and you're gonna run by them. Driver picks the music,” he flipped the empty cassette case back into the box. “Shotgun shuts her piehole.”

Jess shifted her foot to sticking out the window so she could lean back, stretch out, and laugh for the first time all day.


	4. Chapter 4

Dean took her out shooting the first time he got a chance, at least partly out of fear that she'd do something stupid and get one or both of them hurt or maybe killed. He still wasn't sure it was a good idea. The hunting, not the shooting. 

“The gun is always loaded,” he told her, holding it up sideways with his fingers around the top and back end and his thumb under the trigger guard. “Even when you just unloaded it, you treat it like it's loaded. Never assume there isn't some shell casing or something stuck in the barrel that could go off if you get stupid.” 

Jess nodded. Her eyes focused on his hand and the gun rather than his face, but as long as she was paying attention he didn't care too much.

“You keep your fingers,” he waggled his fingers, then his thumb, careful not to drop the thing. Dropping a gun in the middle of your gun safety lecture looked bad. “Off the trigger until you're ready to fire. You don't point a gun at anything you don't intend to shoot. And make sure you can live with whatever's behind it taking the bullet, too.”

“Whatever's behind it?” She didn't sound skeptical; if anything she looked scared, but Dean took the opening to get tough.

“You don't know what you're shooting at till you've hit it. You don't know how your bullet's gonna go through it. You shoot at someone, that bullet might hit them at just the right angle to go through a wall that might be flimsier than you think it is, hit some poor kid on the other side. You don't know for certain.” And he saw her open her mouth, knew what she was going to ask. “And no, that's never happened to me. But it's happened to my Dad.”

More than he meant to say. Dammit, Dean. He kicked himself and kept his expression right where it was because he didn't know Jess well enough to be that uncomfortable in front of her.

She still looked at him kind of funny. “Your Dad...”

“He was in Vietnam.” And that was all he was going to say about that. Two guns, a Browning and a Sig. “Come here, look at this. These. These are the parts of the gun. You got your sight, grip, barrel, uncocking mechanism. Magazine catch, safety. This here...” He broke the first gun open. “That's the chamber, that's where the cartridge goes, pushed in by the slide, sometimes it's a bolt. This is where the bang happens when you fire a gun, you get a badly made gun, that's what's going to explode.” 

“Explode? Really?”

“Not often, but yeah. Don't get distracted.” He kicked her under the knee with the toe of his boot. “Here's your safety mechanism, there's the firing pin. This one you can switch either a double or a single action, 

“I think I get it...” Jess nodded, but she didn't touch the gun as she pointed and named them off. “Barrel, chamber, firing pin, recoil spring...” She didn't do too bad, either. “Exploding zone...”

“Exactly,” Dean grinned, kind of crooked; it wouldn't be a grin if you looked close enough. But she was still concentrating on the gun, not on his face. “If we get enough time, you'll get to the point where you can break one of those down and put it back together in your sleep.”

Awkward. She looked over at him, half-mouthing something that he thought was her denying ever wanting to do that, and then she pressed her lips together and didn't say anything at all. He looked away, focused more on his gun so he didn't have to see all those doubts on her face. So he didn't have to see what she thought of this lifestyle now that she was soaking in it.

“So, what, I'm supposed to take it apart and...”

“No, right now I'm going to teach you to fire a gun. We'll work on maintenance later. Go over the parts again anyway,” he told her as he put the gun back together, slow, so she could name all the pieces as he picked them up. Then he did it again with the other gun because he could, and because she was actually doing pretty well with the memorization. 

And then they had two intact guns. “Okay, what are we shooting?”

“ _Try_ not to sound so eager? We'll find a range later, right now we'll have to make do with a treeline and a few posters.” 

He'd grabbed a couple of band posters, a couple of advertisements off some pillars back in town, slapped them up with some duct tape to a couple of trees now. Good, solid trees; he knocked on them a couple of times to make sure. And these woods were pretty damn remote, though they wouldn't be taking too many shots right now. Dean tried not to feel too itchy about Jess with the guns behind him, to trust that she wouldn't pick one up and start waggling it around. And when he got back to the car it looked like she hadn't. He'd just been around way too many people who thought guns were cool and wanted to shoot things. 

“Right.” He took a breath to kick back the realization that he hadn't actually ever done this before. “Now, guns, they got kind of a kick to them. You'll get a feel for the kind of guns you can handle once you've squeezed off a couple rounds, but for right now...” He passed her the Browning, kept the other for himself. She didn't put her finger on the trigger, either; he saw her hand twitch like she was going to and then she carefully moved her index finger against the trigger guard, keeping the barrel of the gun pointed at the ground. 

“For right now...?”

Dean blinked. “Uh, for right now, let's just make sure you can hit what you aim at. Take a stance. Doesn't matter where you put your feet, don't worry about that,” as she shifted a little to try and match some chick she'd seen in a movie somewhere, he guessed. “Just make sure however you're standing, you're solid. You're not off balance.”

“Okay...” Jess frowned at him but did it anyway. Slightly spread-legged, knees a little bent, but she looked pretty balanced. He shoved her anyway to find out. “Hey!”

“Just checking.” He grinned. “All right, so you're grounded, take a second, use the sight on the gun, that's what it's for. Keep your elbows loose, don't lock your arms.” Because she was, straight out and locked. “You lock your arms, that doesn't give anywhere for the kickback to go. Take a breath, let it out. Focus on the target.” 

He was a bad teacher. Really bad at this, he'd never tried before, it was always Dad's thing. Teaching him and Sammy to shoot. He tried anyway, correcting her aim a little, reminding her to breathe. 

“Now, when you think you've got it, squeeze, don't...”

Even in the open air the sound echoed. Louder than Jess thought, she reached up to cover her ears with her hands and Dean grabbed her gun hand with his free one, knocking it down. “Hey! Always remember, you got a _gun_ in your hand.” 

She blinked, as though she'd just realized what she was about to do. “Oh. Crap.”

“Uh-huh.” Dean sighed. Maybe she wasn't cut out for this. He'd been right the first time and he should have been more firm with the both of them, kept them out of it while he went back to looking for their Dad. Too late now, Dean, he told himself. If nothing else, he had to teach her how to defend herself so she didn't get killed. “All right. Come on, let's try this again.”

  


  


  


“There's no way this can end well.” 

Dean muttered it to himself so no one else would hear and get scared, but it had pretty much become a mantra in his head. He had to admit Jess did good with the research, combing through the source material and legends around the area and even going through Dad's notebook. Under supervision. She'd pulled the video and caught the fast-moving whatever it was, but he still wasn't sure about her in the field like this.

At least she was keeping Haley off his back. He had enough to deal with in Roy the Super-Ranger. No one was impressed with his bear trap stunt, least of all Dean. He felt a little better that Jess hadn't been impressed with it either.

“You sure you know what you're doing?” the older man's voice didn't quite hit sneering levels. Dean still wanted to stop short just so Roy'd run face first into his back. He didn't, but he wanted to. 

“Come on, trust me. I know what...” 

He did stop. Roy stopped right behind him, so much for humiliating the guy with slower reflexes. Behind Roy he heard Jess say something like _stop a second_ and the rest of the footsteps crunched to a halt. 

“You know...?”

“Shut up, man,” Dean hissed. Something didn't smell right. Didn't feel right. “Jess.”

“Yeah?” Her footsteps crunched way too loudly for the woods. Might as well turn this into a lesson, though. 

He gestured her down by him; crouched together they could be examining the ground for tracks or something. Wouldn't look strange whispering together. “Something's not right. Everything's too quiet, it's been quiet since we got in the woods but now it's...” Jess nodded. “And we're not the first ones here. Someone's been here before us.”

And that was as far as he got before the screaming started. A lot of screaming. Him trying to get them to stay there and everyone else charging after the noise, of course. And the kid screaming and he shouted at Jessica to stay there, wasn't sure if she did. He heard the kids calling for their brother, the brother screaming. Or at least, a young man screaming. No time to point out that one young man screaming sounds a lot like another, maybe it wasn't their brother, maybe it wasn't anyone they knew at all. No time for any of this. They charged through the underbrush and all he could think was that this was what hunting really was like. All the chaos and nothing made sense.

The screaming stopped, so he stopped short. Right where he was. Haley came up next to him and he grabbed her arm. 

“Let me go!”

“Shush!” he snapped at almost the same time. “Shut up. Listen.” 

Nothing. “The screaming stopped?” she snapped, which only made him snap back. 

“Exactly. When was the last time screaming just cutting off like that meant anything good to you?” Plus if the creature really had killed anyone there'd be a body, and eating noises. Too much chaos, too much back and forth, he couldn't think. “It's a trap,” he realized, belatedly. Too damn slow even though it was only the time between he stopped and the time when Roy caught up with them. “Shit, it lured us out here...”

“It what?” Roy called at Dean hurtled past him, not quite believing it. “What the hell are you...”

Jess was back there. He'd left Jess back at the campsite, he'd left her there with a gun and no training, no experience, no way of defending herself against a monster that was faster than any human and more deadly than he'd managed to explain to her. And now all he could think of was her body strung up and gutted on a tree and the look on Sam's face when he told him. 

They skidded into the clearing; Dean almost fell over as he came to a stop on a piece of canvas. The tents lay in heaps of shredded material and splintered frames. The packs were broken apart or just plain gone. No sign of Jess anywhere. And no blood.

“Oh my god,” Haley yelped behind him. “Oh god, did it...”

“I told you, you shouldn't have c--” Roy started at the same time. Dean was out of patience. 

“Both of you, shut the hell up!” Then he and Roy both raised their guns as something came crashing down from a high tree branch. Jess.

She dropped to a lower branch, overbalanced for a second and then caught herself around a branch in front of her, swinging down on a couple other branches to drop in a crouch on the forest floor. Still no blood. He didn't see any on her, didn't smell anything. “You were up that tree the whole time?” Dean yelled. Didn't quite yell. Maybe said, very loudly. She'd freaked him out by disappearing up above his head. 

“I heard something coming, wasn't sure it was you guys.” Jess seemed to have a little trouble catching her breath. “I saw it, though. It did look like that, that thing. That Yeti-Wendigo-Bigfoot thing. It was big.”

Dean frowned. “Wendigo don't go this far west...” But he couldn't think of anything else it could be.

“That's because wendigo don't _exist_ ,” Roy said, in possibly his most patronizing tone of the day. Everyone ignored him. 

“Well, it was something, and it was big, and it looked a lot like your...” Jess bit her lip. “The descriptions of a wendigo in that notebook.” 

Haley looked between the two of them but didn't ask about what Jess wasn't saying. With any luck she'd assume the notebook was his, and not ask questions. “What the hell would they be doing this far west...”

“There _are_ no wendigo!” Roy insisted, to the tune of three voices in chorus yelling at him to shut up. Three? Dean looked over at Haley, who looked back at him. 

“Well. Something made those scratch marks.” 

Dean went over to the tree Jess had been hiding under, and she trailed after him. Several deep grooves in the tree in parallel, dug in at the top of the grooves and near enough branches that he could follow them to another set of grooves on a lower branch. Almost head height on him, but still a lower branch. Something had been about to come after her up the tree. 

Jess shuddered. “Why'd it stop?”

“I have no idea...” Everyone else gave them a wide berth, mostly because Haley's baby brother was hiding behind her while she and Roy yelled at each other about whether or not to listen to the strange guy and his side-chick, as Roy called her. 

“Never call me that,” she pointed a finger at him.

“Right. Yeah, I have no idea.” He ran his hand along the grooves. Deep. Bastard had claws and strength behind them. “Maybe it decided you were too much effort? Maybe something else happened, could have heard us coming. Maybe,” the last traces of humor drained from his face. “It decided it had enough food for the winter without going to the effort of getting you out of that tree.”

“Food for the winter.” She shuddered again, and Dean could sympathize. He'd had enough near misses, himself. “You mean, people. Her brother, the kids he was with.” 

Kids. They weren't much older than the hikers and she'd fallen into his habit of calling them all kids, because that was what they felt like. Just kids who didn't know how the world really worked. She did, now, because she'd been there done that, even if it was just the last couple of days. It made her part of his family's world. The rest of them were kids.

“People. It thinks it's got enough food for the winter. We're gonna have to change that. ” Part of being a hunter meant coping with nasty shit like that, killing monsters that ate people. “You up for it?”

She looked over at Haley, who could have been her a week ago. Then she looked back at him. “I am if you are.”

  


  


  


If they made it out of this, Dean decided, this would be a good lesson for Jess to learn. No matter how carefully you planned or how hard you tried, sometimes the monsters won. 

Learning experience for both of them. The wendigo was smart enough to store food for a 23 year cycle or whatever it was, she'd found most of that data. Tracked down the survivor from last time, he'd gladly give her credit for that. Not only did it store food, it hung them up like a butcher's shop, meat on a hook. “God I wish I hadn't thought that,” Dean muttered.

“Huh?” Baby Tommy was almost conscious enough to be verbal. Something more than nothing, he'd take what he could get.

“Nothing. Never mind.” 

He should really get into pilates. Yoga. Something like that, one of those things that would let him swing his legs up and wrap around the hook and do something clever to get his wrists off the pointy part. But he wasn't that flexible and he didn't know how strong you had to be to get your feet up above your head, but he was guessing it was somewhere around 'pretty strong.' 

“Look, my friend's still out there, okay? She'll get us out of here.” Even if he wasn't sure Jess would. Wasn't sure she could. He'd told her to get the rest of them out, he meant it. She needed to get as many people to safety as she could, and right now they were dead men hanging. Roy'd already gotten himself eaten, or maybe killed and eaten, they hadn't stopped to get a good look at the body. Get the kids out, that was the priority, as many people, as many _civilians_ staying alive as possible. Come back for him.

Easy to say it to her, harder to dangle and not think, goddammit, Jess, what's taking you so long? Come get me down from here.

Sam would have gotten him down by now. Or maybe Sam would have gotten them both killed trying to save everyone, who knew how that kid thought anymore. He didn't know what to do with that uncertainty, with not knowing if he could trust that Sam would have his back in the field and having to trust Jess. Okay, not the right way to say it, he knew Sam would have his back, he just didn't know if it would be enough. Maybe his baby brother was out of practice. At killing the creepy shit that they hunted down all their lives, or that followed them. Not such a bad thing. This way, with Sam in law school, at least he was safe.

Unlike the rest of them. Dean's head jerked up against his arms when he heard footsteps crunch, then realized they were too quick and too measured to be the wendigo. “Jess?” Metal creaked on damp, rusty metal next to him as the other kid turned.

“You look like hammered shit,” she grinned.

“Stop flirting with me and get me down from here.” Which she was already doing, but he had to give her a rough time for form's sake at least. So she'd know he was okay. “Where'd you ...”

“I sent them out to the edge of the woods, following the trail. It's still in here, they should be fine to get clear of its territory...” 

Dean rubbed his wrists out of habit and too many bad movies, rolling his shoulders because they actually hurt more than his wrists. “Wait, it's _still in here?_ ”

“We'll be fine, we've got a straight shot to--”

The wendigo screamed. Dean and Jess whipped around to stare at the direction she'd come from, just for a second, before she yanked on Tommy's hook and almost pulled the whole damn thing out of the ceiling. He didn't scream, even though Dean had the twisted feeling she might have popped his shoulder out of the socket. 

“You had to say it, didn't you?” 

“Just keep moving,” she snapped back. “I got a plan.”

Keep moving was a good plan. Dean wasn't too happy about the rest of it, though. “Gimme that...” he grabbed the gun tucked in the back of her waistband. “That's a stupid place to put a gun, anyway, people only do that in movies.” Or when they didn't have any other good place to tuck a gun. She had her hands busy, constantly looking back over her shoulder as they ran through the old mining tunnels. “What the hell, Jess, you...”

Movement out of the corner of their eye. Tommy screamed. Dean ducked. 

Jess straightened up and held up her hands and the next thing he knew a jet of flame came wooshing by his head out of her hands, straight for the wendigo's face. Or whatever it was reaching towards them.

“Hairspray?” Dean squeaked. He managed to make up for the sound by picking the kid up off the ground and dragging him through the tunnels. 

Jess kept going with the makeshift flamethrower. Any second now the tunnels were going to collapse on them, she'd hit a pocket of mine gas, firedamp, something. The wendigo kept screaming. Long habit kept Dean running, shoving the kid ahead of him, making sure Jess followed after. Sweat poured down his face from the fire, and the chemical smell went right up his nose and stabbed into his brain with a headache. 

“Almost out...” she panted. They could see daylight. “Almost out almost out almost out...”

Dean bit his lip, then all but shoved Tommy at Jess. “Keep moving, I'm right behind you!” And she didn't know him well enough to guess otherwise. He still couldn't believe this worked. Was working. Almost working. He grabbed the can and the lighter from her, hoping the wendigo was far enough away for this to work. “I don't hear you running!”

“Dean...” Jess's voice came too close for comfort.

Tape would have been better. The remains of his button-down flannel would have to do. He made a quick bundle out of the can of hairspray, the lighter at the front, and watched the wendigo charge him. “Little closer,” he panted. “Little closer. Come on, ugly. You wanna live forever? Come and get me!” It was almost on top of him when he threw the makeshift grenade, raised the gun and fired. One in a million shot to hit the lighter dead on enough to explode.

It felt like a sunburn on his face, and the trees seemed to stand in the sky. A heartbeat later blonde hair and blinking eyes filled his vision. “Dean? Hey, Dean!” 

More like reading lips than actually hearing her. “Are my eyebrows intact?” 

Jess rolled her eyes. “Come on, I'm not carrying you all the way back to the road by myself. Your eyebrows are fine. And it's dead,” she looked over him, back the way he'd been facing before he'd knocked himself on his ass. “I think it's dead.”

“After all that, it better be dead,” he muttered, dragging himself to his feet. “Still think you want to do this?” 

She glared back at him. Her face covered in dirt, streaked in patterns that looked eerily familiar until he remembered where he'd last seen them. In a mirror, ten, fifteen years ago. Her eyes were a little bloodshot which could have been anything, except the way her hands fidgeted. Definitely not giving her the gun back anytime soon. “Yeah,” she nodded, straightening up as soon as she realized he was staring. “Yeah, I'm sure.”

And she wasn't going to talk about it. She'd fit right in with the Winchester family. 

“Okay then. Let's get out of these woods.”


End file.
